This isn’t turning out to be a good week if you’re a Chromebook hardware fan. Previously planned Chromebooks with Nvidia GPUs are no longer in the works. This follows Monday’s news that Qualcomm Gen 3 Snapdragon 7c Chromebooks were canceled.
Indeed, a reader comment from the Snapdragon post pointed out the Google code that explains, in no uncertain terms, that several ChromeOS baseboards have been canceled. I did a little more research and all three of those boards share one common feature. They all were designed to support Nvidia GPUs.
This is such a great example of why I titled my review of Chrome OS Flex “a good start with zero follow-through”. Google puts all this effort and marketing into bringing Steam to Chrome OS officially, and even lets several OEMs manufacture and sell gaming-focused Chromebooks… Only to then let it fizzle out and not follow through with better, more gaming-suited hardware. You can almost taste the internal struggle between people wanting to turn Chrome OS into something bigger than what it is now, and the people who just want to shovel cheap plastic crap to schools.
Whether you like Chrome OS or not, that just sucks. I want all platforms to get meaningfully better, but Google just doesn’t seem to care at all about Chrome OS.
That’s a wierd take…. not having an nvidia GPU means it might be an Intel or AMD GPU with an open source driver…. etc.